Ever been confused – What is the difference between a blog and a website?
The first thing to know is that a blog is a type of website, so it’s not entirely accurate to describe something as either one or the other. Rather, the question should be, what makes a blog different to other types of websites?
As a subset of websites, blogs (originally coined as a shortening of ‘weblog’) are generally distinguished by being interactive (eg, by allowing comments), being updated regularly (posts often carry the date of publication) and written in a less formal and/or personal way. Many of the blogs that I read are written in the first person.
This makes them different to other websites that typically contain a home page and other pages linking to information such as contact details, products for sale, terms and conditions and other such (relatively) static resources.
There is, of course, often a fine line in defining whether a website is a blog or not and many websites have blogs attached to them anyway.
So do you want to start up a blog or website?
Working out whether you want to start a blog or a static website really depends on what you are trying to achieve.
If you are a business it is expected that you have a website (yes, blogs are websites too, but you know what I mean!)
Businesses involved in e-commerce have particular needs for their websites including the integration of payment gateways, such as Paypal and credit cards and the associated security requirements that go with that. But even if you do not sell directly from your website you will want potential customers to reach your site when they are searching for you or businesses like you. At a minimum you would include contact details and a description of the business.
The website becomes part of your branding and the quality of your site is likely to impact on what your customers think of the business. That’s why top businesses pay top dollars for website design, from expert coders to graphic designers.
Fortunately, as you will discover in other parts of this blog, there are some cheaper options for building websites that cater for those of us who aren’t multi-national companies with million dollar budgets – and they offer professional designs and superb functionality.
But what about the blog?
For many people and businesses however, the blog is the simplest and most effective way for them to get their message out in an engaging manner.
Through intelligent use of social media, blog posts can be easily promoted and shared and, as readership grows, so too does engagement of your readers on your posts.
Perhaps the best thing is that blogs are incredibly easy and cheap to establish, and they don’t require much in the way of technical knowledge, coding or even graphic design skills.
All you really need is something to write about.
Thankfully most of the modern platforms for writing blogs are so simple that you can spend your time producing awesome content and marketing for your blog, rather than wasting time scratching your head anxiously trying to work out how to re-size photos so that they fit in the right spot of your article.
Having grown up in the 1980’s with some experience working on student newspapers, I was familiar with the lengthy processes involved in layout. But blogging is nothing like that. When I first started blogging in the mid 2000’s I was completely blown away by how easy it was to add a photograph to an article to make it fit perfectly. What used to take hours can now be done in just minutes. It’s that easy.
Once you have decided on which platform best suits you to start your blog, and have selected suitable hosting, you can have your blog up and running in literally less than half an hour. And once you’ve established your blog, updating is only limited by your imagination.
So can I have both?
Yes, of course you can. In the blurred line between blogs and websites, it’s easy to have both and the best platform, WordPress works perfectly and seamlessly for both. check out an example of our blog page here and learn how to build a wordpress site/blog over here
